Sometimes you buy something on eBay,…

Well that happened to me last week. I bought some “Reproduction” Swiss Bank notes and I was very happy to have found them on eBay, but I was very disappointed when they arrived. I will explain to you in a minute why.

But first let me tell you why I bougth those Bank notes. A friend of mine in Switzerland has been asked to cooperate with a Swiss Television Production, because this summer, the Swiss Radio and Television (SRF) takes a look back to the year 1914. In three episodes life in Switzerland is illuminated on the eve of the First World War. One of the highlights of the 2014 program “Anno 1914 – life like 100 years ago.” During the broadcast stories about the everyday life of a working class family and a wealthy industrialist family are told. The figures are depicted by actors, but also by laymen.

First Automobile clatter along dusty roads, crackling telephone lines connect people, trams jolt through booming cities, thousands of machines roar in oily factories and produce mass-produced!

Mass culture, conformity, new technologies in 1914 are contradictory: Dynamic, confusing and seemingly neat. Europe and Switzerland teeter on the eve of the First World War between modernity and tradition, optimism and doubt. It is the year in which the Belle Époque breathed their last trains and heading the same time on their own end. Because of the outbreak of the First World War it will be the abrupt end of the “good old days”, in Switzerland too.

In this era of contrasts, the SRF- time travel leads “Anno 1914: The life of a hundred years ago.” In the Belle Époque, the population and economy develop rapidly.

Well as said, this friend of mine was asked to cooperate, helping with clothing and giving advice about the “Belle Époque”. So I offered him to make reproduction paperwork for this production. That’s why I scanned the internet about Swiss paperwork between 1900 and 1914 and came at the following eBay item: 6x Swiss Francs, Second Serie since 1910, Rare, Reproduction, UNC

When I saw this I looked at the price. With shipment to the Netherlands would be a total of 17 Euros. I thought that this price for 6 Bank notes was a little to high, but hey, I needed the notes as an example to make my own reproductions. So I ordered it thinking that I would get very good reproductions for that amount of money, else I wouldn’t have bought them.

Then two days after I got an envelope with the six reproduced banknotes. What a rip off it was. Reproductions of a very poor quality. I will show you the pictures in a minute so you can judge for yourself. Printed with an inkjet printer on the wrong kind of paper. Way to much money for such repros. So disappointed.

Nevertheless I found some pretty good scans on a website about Bank notes. I don’t have them all yet, but somehow I will find me better examples than the ones I got from Germany over eBay. So I can start making my own reproductions of Swiss Bank notes for the “Belle Époque”.